After the Despot: Changing Patterns of Leadership and Social Control in Kilenge, West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

<p>This dissertation examines the continuing process of transition, transformation, and adaptation of the people of Ongaia village to their changing social environment. It concentrates on a problem which reflects a people's concern for their future in the year 1977. I focus specifically on changing patterns of leadership and social control, and contend that such patterns are not merely due to colonial and post-colonial impositions of centralized administrations; changing patterns of leadership and social control are in large part a product of Ongaian adaptation to and manipulation of external stimuli. The relatively unusual response of the Ongaiains is explained in terms of several factors:</p> <p>1. Traditional indigenous leadership patterns which, unlike leadership in most Melanesian societies, were based on ascription to a defined and named leadership position or office.</p> <p>2. The fusion of traditional and introduced leadership roles.</p> <p>3. The activities of one particular leader, the paramount ~uluai appointed in the wake of the Second World War.</p> <p>4. The alleged use of sorcery as a tool of political assassination, and the consequences of people's beliefs regarding this.</p> <p>5. The current explicit and implicit demands on leadership, which legally require the election of a man to office, and in practice demand that he be a forceful, entrepreneurial sort.</p> <p>Chapter I outlines the problems examined in the dissertation, describes the setting and conduct of the research, and provides a brief introduction to the Kilenge of West New Britain. In Chapter II, I describe and analyze Kilenge social organization, thus examining the social mutrix of leadership and correcting certain errors in the ethnographic record. Traditional leadership and social control are discussed in Chapter III, as are the social consequences of the first introduced leadership roles. The place of sorcery in Kilenge society, and its use as a social control, are delineated in Chapter IV. Chapter V examines the thirty year career of the paramount luluai Aisapo, and also explores the social changes wrought in that period. The consequences of l\.isapo' s actions for contemporary leadership form the subject of Chapter VI. The final chapter, VII, compares Kilenge reaction and adaptation to the course of events in o-cher socie-ties in Papua New Guinea, and draws conclusions aimed at explaining, the current national political dilemma in that country.</p>